Graham Cushway has written a valuable but difficult book about the
operations of English naval forces under Edward III. The valuable
aspect of the book is the massive amount of research Cushway has done
into all the aspects of the raising, maintenance, and use of naval
forces during this period. Chapters cover such topics as the
logistics of ship building and repair, the connection between
England's merchant marine and its ability to deploy naval force in an
age when specialized warships were few and far between and many ships
in a royal fleet consisted of converted merchant ships, the mechanisms
of impressment by which such composite fleets were raised, the types
of ships upon which the king could call, and the administrative
structures that activated all these mechanisms. These chapters, drawn
from Cushway's doctoral dissertation, constitute a sort of naval
corollary to H.J. Hewitt's classic study of Edward's armies, The
Organization of War under Edward III (1966). Further thematic
chapters detail the political context in which the raising of naval
forces took place, including resistance that was at times significant
which helps explain the decline of the fleet in the last years of
Edward's reign. Reflecting the rehabilitation of campaign-and-battle
oriented military history in the decades since Hewitt wrote, Cushway
analyzes the strategic and tactical patterns of 14th century naval
warfare thematically as well.

The lessons of these chapters reinforce and extend the main themes of
the administrative and military history of Edward III's reign.
Institutional growth and development was a matter of ad hoc personal
relationships becoming routine, with the consequence that particular
persons become gradually less important to the operation of many
aspects of government. Cushway shows that the same process extended
to the maintenance of naval forces. But the fact that ships,
captains, and merchants were somewhat less organically connected to a
social power structure grounded in landed property than were armies
(and certainly less than the people who served in local governance,
courts, and Parliament) meant that the fortunes and developmental
trajectories of nascent naval institutions were more fragile and
subject to decline than some other aspects of governance. This
dynamic also contributed to the decline of English naval forces at the
end of Edward's reign and made that decline deeper and more disruptive
than that which affected English armies.

Cushway thus contributes to the debate about the origins and
development of "The English Navy" by exposing the problem of
continuity (or lack thereof) that hangs over the question of whether
Edward III's naval forces can really claim to be The English Navy.
Earlier naval forces going back to Anglo-Saxon times have also been
cited as foundational to the history of the English navy, but their
institutional connection to Edward's naval forces is tenuous at best--
Edward's mechanisms for raising ships owed nothing to the Anglo-Saxon
ship fyrd, for instance. And whether Edward's mechanisms survived and
developed in any continuous, "institutional" way into later centuries
is equally open to question. Cushway's detailed account of the
constantly improvised, ad hoc nature of naval administration brings
greater clarity to this whole set of issues. On the other hand,
Cushway does not clearly assert his own position on this ultimate
question.

Furthermore, in terms of the value of the book, this detailed, well-
researched and extensively documented account (Boydell & Brewer are to
be commended for using footnotes instead of endnotes) is supported by
a terrific illustration program. An extensive set of color plates
complement the descriptions of ship types and the dangers of naval
combat. The book is generally well produced, though the type face is
somewhat smaller than is ideal, presumably in order to keep the page
count down.

For this is a long book. This is, in itself, not one of the difficult
aspects of the book, but is a direct result of the central difficulty
which is that Cushway has tried to write two books at once. The two
books sit uncomfortably between one set of covers.

The thematic chapters on which this review has so far focused make up
only a portion of book. Cushway recognized that for readers other
than specialists in English naval history (and perhaps medieval
maritime history more generally), the thematic chapters, which he drew
directly from his doctoral dissertation, threatened to be somewhat
dry, technical, and unexciting. They were fascinating to this
reviewer, but Cushway was probably not wrong in this assessment. His
solution was to interleave among the thematic chapters more
traditional narrative chapters that trace the course of the first half
of the Hundred Years War from a naval perspective. These are indeed a
livelier read, but their scholarly value is less clear than the
thematic chapters. For one thing, the story is already fairly well
known (unlike the story of administrative improvisation and
development told in the other chapters), having been narrated
dramatically in the 14th century itself by Jean Froissart, whose
accounts of the battles of Sluys and Winchelsea and other naval
activity remain fundamental to what we know, down through an
authoritative study by N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea
(1997), with the maritime aspects of land campaigns covered at least
tangentially in other military histories of the war. Unlike in the
thematic chapters, where Cushway has unearthed and analyzed a treasure
trove of new archival evidence, his narrative chapters rely on these
earlier and well known primary and secondary sources. They are
therefore both less original and less copiously grounded in good
evidence.

In theory, the two sets of chapters complement each other, with the
thematic chapters filling in the background, so to speak, of the
narrative. But the two sorts of chapters are not as well integrated
as they could be, and one ends up feeling that one has read an
interrupted narrative and a scattered thematic analysis; neither set
of chapters ever develops real momentum. Furthermore, the weaving
together of two sorts of chapters leaves the intended readership of
the book somewhat unclear. Specialists may well focus on the thematic
chapters and only skim the narrative, while potential general readers
will either do the reverse, or be put off entirely by the first
thematic chapter they encounter. Neither outcome is ideal.

Ultimately, for this reviewer, the valuable contributions Cushway
makes to the scholarship on English naval forces in the 14th century
outweigh the problematic nature of the book. But the difficulty of
the book's structure makes it a work to be recommended only to
specialists, despite the author's valiant attempt to give it story-
telling pizazz.